Would you believe United States employees cost their employers $650 billion in productivity costs in the seconds it takes for them to return attention back to the task at hand? The time spans lost are the same amount of time required to interpret a CAPTCHA. E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, etc. are all distractions from getting…
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley My review rating: 5 of 5 stars Darwin’s theory of natural selection opened a can of worms. Matt Ridley adds to the support for the case by attempting to explain: Why sexual and not asexual reproduction? Why males and females? Why do…
Edupunk is “Do It Yourself” in education or instruction technology. Free or at least cheap tools suitable for classroom use are so ubiquitous, the faculty have plenty of alternatives to the monolithic “enterprise” LMS. If edupunk was a boat, then what would it be? A bamboo raft? This is not something new. My mom conned…
Information is only valuable when found. It is great someone took notes during the conference call, but four months later, when I do not recall the date of the meeting or who sent the notes, I’ll rely on my computer searching for it. Thunderbird returns pretty quickly when it searches subjects only. So I will…
A few weeks ago when I got home from out of town, I could not find the remote to my TiVo. On the third day, I ran to Best Buy to acquire a universal remote replacement. The replacement lacked critical usability features. Several buttons were simply missing: Select button to navigate the menus. Guide button…
Mom sent me The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child for my birthday a while back. This is the latest book I have been reading while eating. So last night, I put Chelsea on the spot by asking her, “Which would you rather be judged by: what you do or who…
Blackboard implemented a ranking system to determine the priority of support tickets. This effort uses criteria like the age and recency of updates to ensure the attention of Technical Support Managers. Certainly this initiative is due to continuing customer complaints about languishing tickets. Last spring we saw a similar push to fix support. We have…